The Trail of Gold and Silver: Mining in Colorado, 1859-2009

12: Mining on the Docket of Public Opinion: The Environmental Age

227 Almost from the days of the Pike’s Peak gold rush, there had been Colo­ radans and others concerned about mining’s impact on the environment. The reasons have been many, but the discussions and actions generally were local. Rossiter Raymond raised the issue of the destruction of trees in a national forum, but Rico dealt with the problem at its immediate com­ munity level. Sitting beside her adored O-Be-Joyful Creek, in the heart of the Gunnison country, Helen Hunt Jackson mused about the effects of mining. To her, the sparkling stream and the nearby field of purple asters were far more valuable than the minerals for which the prospectors searched and the miners dug. “There is no accounting for differences in values; no adjusting them either, unluckily.”1 Central City in the 1860s, and Telluride in the 1890s, became concerned about mining pollution in their water sources, but, faced with the prospect of harming their economic base, chose a prosperous economy over public health. Mining on the Docket of Public Opinion: The Environmental Age 12 Mining on the Docket of Public Opinion 228 Lawyer, historian, and environmentalist James Grafton Rogers, in the mid-twentieth century, wrote about his beloved Georgetown area in My Rocky Mountain Valley. One of the themes was how mining had affected the land: Of all the scars men leave on nature the mine dumps in the West are the most conspicuous and permanent. There is a diagonal band across Colorado, from Boulder to Rico, perhaps fifty miles wide and two hun­ dred and fifty long, where men found precious metals. . . . [T]hese relics of the miner seem unchanged although a century has gone past. The scars do not heal. The mine dumps, the piles of rocks excavated from shafts and tun­ nels, the beds of mill tailings all up the valley, the heaps of boulders left by gold dredges about a generation ago along the canyon stream—these seem untouched by time.2 Anyone near a smelter could see the smoke’s impact on the land, but not so clear was the impact on people’s health in Leadville, Central City, or Colorado Springs. Nor was this concern limited solely to Colorado. J. Ross Brown, John Muir, and Mary Hallock Foote, among others, commented on the environmental problems created wherever mining was or had been. Several concerns had been expressed—and litigated—in Colorado earlier in the twentieth century, but no national or even statewide anxiety had yet been exhibited. All that changed in the 1960s, when the storm that had been gathering for years finally broke. The great environmental awakening was at hand and a popular cause was a-borning. No Colorado incident brought this about; a multitude of factors figured into the equation. The publication of books such as Rachel L. Carson’s Silent Spring and Harry M. Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands popularized the subject of the environment and frightened readers. Increased knowledge about the environment and about industrial impact on it intensified the public’s con­ sciousness of the threat that pollution posed to all Americans. Also, during the administrations of Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the federal government became more actively involved with environmental mat­ ters. This, combined with growing activism among America’s youth (who were particularly cause-oriented during the 1960s and 1970s), meant that Americans soon became polarized over environmental issues. The result was, among other things, a host of federal laws passed during those decades dealing with environmental issues. Mining crossed a watershed in its history then, though the long-range significance of this shift in public perception and concern went unacknowledged at the time. It had been a long time coming, but the effect would not be totally recognized until later. Mining on the Docket of Public Opinion 229 The nineteenth-century industrial attitudes and philosophy about progress, profits, and prosperity had carried through the first six decades of the twenti­ eth century. Now, in the latter half of the twentieth century, environmental­ ism was “in” and the day of judgment had come. Conservation, ecology, and environment were words that had carried little meaning a generation earlier. Now, they suddenly became the watchwords of a new and increasingly pop­ ular mindset. The mining industry, nearly blindsided, found itself on the defensive, as terms such as raper, polluter, and exploiter were lobbed at it with reckless abandon. Some...